What’s the Matter

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In his poem When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer, Walt Whitman recounts his weariness on observing a scientist’s charts and diagrams; he prefers instead to wander by himself and look up “in perfect silence at the stars”.

The notion that science strips majesty from the Universe and renders it prosaic is persistent. Among their many achievements, the scientists at Cern, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, have demonstrated how wrong it is. Their research provides an insight into the nature of the Universe. The information it yields has still more grandeur for being the product of human inquiry rather than